ABSTRACT

Picking up on the concept of death-drive, as discussed by Freud and Lacan, this essay examines the ways in which the film Tributes–Pulse: A Requiem for the 20th Century uses decomposing film material, not as a final state, but rather as a new beginning for cinema. Similar to the death-drive's capacity to transcend the common dichotomy of life and death, Morrison's film keeps the disintegrating images alive in their process of dying. Dying proves to be the very opposite of death: not some ultimate break but an active process, which can be prolonged, paused, and extended into eternity. The title's ‘pulse’ can be understood, as the irresistible, undead beat of the drive itself, which has no other goal than its own circular movement.

KEYWORDS

circularity, death, drive, pulsar

What we see, we cannot tell. These bubbling, crumbling, dying images leave us speechless, breathless, and devastated. Is this how it all ends, or how it starts? Or is it both?

The images with which Bill Morrison opens his film Tributes–Pulse: A Requiem for the 20th Century are in such an extreme state of decay that it is impossible to tell what they once featured. The decomposing nitrate film stock shows nothing more than pure visual noise – a degree zero of cinema – or even less than that. Thus, the unprepared viewer may wonder if this constantly changing, flickering chaos of dots and lines, covering almost the entire frame, is really cinematographic after all, or if it is only graphic. Indeed, the opening shots look more like pencil drawings or minute etchings, depicting some mysterious fungi, like the one covering those last rocks visited by the time traveller in H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine on his journey to end of the world. Pre-filmic in its appearance, anything could be hidden in this incomprehensible, primordial mess. And there are things hiding: since it is from this very chaos of flickering black and white that Morrison allows all the other scenes of his film emerge, eventually also his own original material, with which the film concludes.